The All Star game nobody cares about

The All Star game is setting itself up to be quite a disappointment. A few selected (including the leagues best goalie Roberto Lunongo) have chosen not to attend, and many others will be missing the game due to injury (Sidney Crosby). Without a number of star players there, plus the NHL's odd "every team gets to send somebody" philosophy there doesn't seem to be much incentive to watch the game this year.

The pre-all star game events should be improved as the league has apparently realized that it is best to begin writing out the young stars game, and I think the entire thing is going to be something like ten minutes with a running clock or something. It would be awesome if one of the players finds a way to last through the entire game without taking a single shift. More importantly the shootout will include style points, so hopefully that will be fun to watch. Hopefully the stick handling and skating parts of the skills competition will be removed (none of the fastest skaters are there anyhow), and the league sticks to the funner ones such as hardest shot, and picking off the plates in the corners of the net.

Without Crosby in the game I'm not sure what the national television people will have to talk about. Lets hope that they don't wind up getting Crosby in the booth for the game, and actually talk about some of the others there instead. Wishful thinking, but it just might happen. More likely is that Versus will not bring back the nauseating "rail-cam" that they used last year, which was too slow to really track the puck.

Before the all star break the Sabres have one more game that counts, when the play the Dallas Stars tonight. They didn't play the Stars last season, and to be honest I can't remember any of the sparse games Buffalo has had against this team since Hull had his foot in the crease...